Putin and the Russians have suffered too many killings of their own people in the past. Now they want the whole of the 'Prime Minister's private army' wiped out, including Blake Johnson and Charles Ferguson. Somebody is after them: Blake, Harry Miller, his sister, Monica, Harry Salter and Billy. The only people spared are Roper and Dillon. After surviving a car bomb, Ferguson heads a desperate search to uncover the perpetrator.

It is night in Manhattan. The president of the United States is scheduled to have dinner with an old friend, but in the building across the street a man has disabled the security and stands at a window, a rifle in his hand. The assassination doesn't go according to plan, but this is only the beginning. Someone is recruiting a shadowy network of agents with the intention of creating terror. Their range is broad, their identities masked, their methods subtle.

Treachery has a price, in the mesmerizing new Sean Dillon thriller from the Sunday Times-bestselling author. Helmand Province, Afghanistan: a lone convoy edges its way towards a deserted mountain village, led by US Army Rangers in Mastiff APVs. Stopping to search the area, the Rangers are hit by a massive roadside bomb, and as half the patrol lie dead or injured, the rest are ambushed with military precision.

In Ulster, Northern Ireland, a petty criminal kills a woman in a drunken car crash. Her sons swear revenge. In London, Sean Dillon and his colleagues in the 'Prime Minister's private army', fresh from defeating a deadly al-Qaeda operation, receive a warning: 'You may think you have weakened us, but you have only made us stronger'. In Washington, DC, a special projects director with the CIA, frustrated at not getting permission from the president for his daring antiterrorism plan, decides to put it in motion anyway. Soon the ripples from these events meet and overlap.

The murderous Rashid family were forced to pay the ultimate price for their crimes by the British government's secret enforcer, Sean Dillon, and his undercover team. Yet one member of that oil-rich dynasty was allowed to live, and that could have been Dillon's fatal mistake. Kate Rashid witnessed her brothers being killed one by one, and now she has sworn vengeance. Sean Dillon, White House operative Blake Johnson, even the US president himself...their time is coming, and only she knows how - or when.